Just over a dozen years ago, India threw open its economic doors to the world after four decades of tariffs and bans had nearly bankrupted her. But the initial spurt of foreign interest was ground down by what one of the most distinguished of India-watchers, Mark Tully, calls the Neta-Babu Raj - the deeply corrupt rule of politicians and bureaucrats.

In India in Slow Motion, Tully sets off with his partner, Gillian Wright, to find out why progress is so slow in India; why religious communalism is on the increase and corruption as endemic as ever. And yet, as one would expect from a man who has devoted his work and life to India for nearly 40 years, the journey is funny, poignant, profoundly informed and engagingly intimate.

Tully, born in Calcutta, though educated in England, held the post of BBC bureau chief in Delhi for 25 years. Few foreigners manage to get under the skin of the world's biggest democracy the way he does, and fewer still can write about it with the clarity and insight he brings to all his work.

With anecdote and example Tully and Wright examine bonded child labour, crises in agriculture and water distribution, the halting rise of an e-culture, and the survival of a changing Christianity and Islam in the face of Hindu nationalism. But underpinning all this is the corruption of politicians and civil servants into whose pockets disappear between 80 and 90 rupees of every 100 allocated to public projects.

Inherited from the British Raj, this unholy alliance permeates every level of activity. As one businessman, who shifted all his investment to South-East Asia, told Tully, at least there he gets what he pays for. In India, all you get are more of grasping hands. But for all that, says Tully, there is hope: in a fiercely independent supreme court, a crusading free press and an absolute commitment to representative democracy. It's time to slip those last reins of rundown colonial institutions.